Malinda Trollinger Revisited

Sunday, November 15, 2015
                    Cloudy and cold

Malinda Trollinger Revisited

   I decided to renew my writing again - for how long, and how much, I cannot say. It's refreshing to start again, and I decided to revisit old friends who have helped me out on my "quest". One of these fine people is Malinda Trollinger whom I found on ebay. Malinda has been helped her father sell his huge collection of toys and other collectibles. 

For today, I found a fine die cast Ertl Greyhound bus from the 1940's. 

What's "special" about this toy is that it's from the Ertl toy company, and it's a new discovery for me.

I've written about other die cast toy companies, but never knew that the Ertl company made die cast aluminum toys back in the 1940's.

It's made from aluminum and was distributed by the Dubuque Toy Company of Dubuque, Iowa, USA. THe bus is painted silver, with blue paint around the windows and cream colour on the top (roof), as well as on the raised images of the running Greyhounds on each side. There are two rubber tires on the from and four on the back.

The toy measures:

length x width x height:

9 1/4" x 2 1 /4"  x 2 1/2"

230 mm x 37 mm x 65mm

and weighs:

7.5 oz

212.8 grams

What's interesting about the toy is that it does not have the side door for passengers to enter the bus.

Obviously, to keep costs down, the doors were not created or even designed to integrate into the entry side of the toy.

I purposely left the top photo (below) untouched. Malinda takes excellent photos, and that;s what originally caught my attention.  All of the other photos have been "worked on" and their respective backgrounds removed, and replaced with white.

Die cast metal toys sometimes get brittle with time. This is especially true when the die cast alloy of metals (in this case it's 100% aluminum) is poured from the "bottom of the cauldron" with some impurities poured also. I was had a die cast toy arrive in 1000 pieces. It was poorly packaged, but more so, it was most likely poured from the last few ounces of molten metal alloy.

In the top photo of the tryptic ( a composite photo made of 3 small ones below), you can clearly see

some damage or a poor pour from the aluminum. WhenI first started to blog, I bought and sold lots of Tootsietoys and other brands. In fact,  irregular" pours such as the one above were actually acceptable at the time. Also, sometimes small additional parts would be left on the toy, rather than be filed down.

I like the low camera angle and the slight tilt of the camera that Malinda did.

I ca';t explain why, but it works well as a memory of a 1940's bus and toy.

For a die cast toy that's been around for  70 or more years and hauled 500,000 passengers and driven 2,000,000 miles, that's not too bad!

Thanks for visiting,

and as always,

have a great part of the day or night,,

wherever you may be,

Stacey

toysearcher@gmail.com